It Wasn't Me
“It Wasn’t Me is a 2000 single by Shaggy from his fifth album Hot Shot. It reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.[1] It is a reggae song about a man who is caught cheating on his girlfriend. He asks his friend what to do, and his friend just tells him to deny everything by saying “it wasn’t me”. This obviously isn’t good advice since his girlfriend has lots of evidence against him, making the song’s story humorous.
Besides the song’s success on the charts, it is also notable for inspiring “the Shaggy defense”, a term for when someone accused of something just says it wasn’t them, like the man in the song.[2] The term came into being when R. Kelly was involved in a sex scandal, where Kelly said he wasn’t the man in a video showing him having sex with an underage girl.[3]